Zaikio has doubled the number of customers for its procurement product during the recent IPIA Excellence in Print event.
Going into the event the company had eight customers ordering paper through Premier Paper via the cloud based software. It picked up a further 16 during the day, says Karl Ciz, development director, meaning that before Christmas there will be 32 users in total.
This comes before an integration between Zaikio and Tharstern MIS is completed. This is anticipated by the end of January and will allow a Tharstern user to check availability and price of paper for a job from Premier, resulting in more accurate estimates as up to the minute pricing is involved.
And while in Germany printers can order a growing range of products via the platform, in the UK printers can anticipate at some point ordering from Antalis (it is already part of the platform in Germany) and consumables from Heidelberg in Q1, says Ciz.
“The procurement product is already embedded in 500 print organisations,” he says. The roll out has focused in the German speaking countries before heading north to Scandinavia and now to the UK. The structured nature and cloud location of the technology allows for rapid enhancements, some applying to the Premier implementation. The system first checks availability in the most appropriate of the Premier warehouses and would previously signal a ‘not available’ message if not in stock in that warehouse. Now the software checks other Premier warehouses too.
“When we started we thought the most important function would be to check the price, now we find that availability is more important than price”, says Ciz.
Access via Tharstern will add to Zaikio’s own direct connections to paper merchants. “We have been asked for a while if we wanted to come on board,” says managing director of Tharstern Keith McMurtrie. “Now is the right time.
“We are looking for more efficient ways to connect disparate applications together, so let’s start with procurement. We have a lot of customers that use Premier to supply paper. We see this as a proactive move on our side, rather than reacting to demand from clients.”
